> The code base I'm working on has been developed for about 3 years by a team of 4 people. I have no trouble navigating it, nor does anybody else on the team.
Now try that on the code base developed by 100 developers on three countries across two years.
This is what most Fortune 500 enterprise projects look like.
I have never seen any project developed by a 100 developers without it being split up into manageable chunks. This is true even for companies like Google.
You might have an umbrella project that's developed by 100s of developers. If you actually look at how the work is split up, you'll see that individual teams rarely exceed 10 people.
The joys of spending one to two months doing integrations until everything finally works, for each milestone.
Just because a few companies happen to do it right, doesn't mean the majority does it.
In one of such projects, the developers were deploying code to a live server, after producing the corresponding artifacts on their own computers. Management did not care, because it worked most of the time anyway.
Now try that on the code base developed by 100 developers on three countries across two years.
This is what most Fortune 500 enterprise projects look like.